Mumbai: After a restrictive implementation of fourth-year undergraduate programmes under National Education Policy (NEP) this year, Mumbai University and subsequently the state govt plan to lift all caveats for the current third-year batch, which will move to the fourth year in April-May 2027. The requirement for a postgraduate department in the respective courses, which made several courses offered by autonomous colleges ineligible last year, will be removed.Fourth-year seats will also not be limited to the intake capacity in PG courses. Instead, all eligible students completing the three-year UG programme will be able to choose one of the three pathways as per their choice—fourth-year honours, honours with research or master’s. The decision will be left to colleges, based on the demand from their students.“Guidelines for implementation, fine-tuning the process and ensuring quality will be released and clarified soon,” said a university official. Next year, all MU and state colleges will implement the fourth year. Since autonomous colleges are a year ahead of the regular affiliated colleges in the implementation of NEP, their first batch of students in the fourth year was in the current academic session of 2026-27.The phase-wise implementation of the fourth-year programmes under NEP next year will also see changes in the syllabus content for the fourth year. While this year colleges were asked to follow the same syllabus as that of the first-year master’s programme, next year, the focus will be on the core subject and industry-centric specialisation, added the university official. For instance, a college offering BCom (accounting and finance) or BAF was compelled to offer students an option to pursue the fourth year in either accountancy or finance as they did not have a master’s department in accounting and finance. Now, a fourth year in BAF will also be permitted without any conditions. The honours with research option, however, will be offered based on the availability of teachers as guides.Early this year, the eleventh-hour implementation guidelines put leading autonomous colleges in a spot, with several aspirants denied the option of pursuing fourth-year honours. Colleges, however, are wary of delayed guidelines this year. A city college principal said that they had extensively advertised for the four-year courses on their websites since 2023, but the guidelines, which came months before the fourth-year admissions, derailed their plans. “This year we removed all the posts advertising the fourth year and have asked students to keep their options open,” said a principal, adding that they are hoping to get the guidelines early enough to plan their course of action.Another principal, however, said that they are keen on offering the fourth year in all courses. “We have seen more demand in courses such as psychology this year and some of the science courses. Many students who were looking forward to the fourth year were disappointed this year. The demand in B Com, however, was poor vis-à-vis the total number of students enrolled,” he said.
